As you may or may not be aware, I have gone back to school, doing an audio engineering course. To say the least, it’s a trip, being in class with people that are about half your age and already having the understanding of most of the stuff so far. I say ‘so far’ because I am expecting it to get a lot tougher when I get into the Diploma level stuff next year. Recording and live sound are things which I have little experience and will be expected to master, no worries, that’s why I’m there! Anyway, amongst other things they expect me to do assignments which generally involve either listening to music or sitting in the studio for hours on end writing music, both of which I am very comfortable with. One of these ‘assignments’ involved listening to a piece of music and analyzing it, you know, number of bars, key, that sort of thing. I decided to take it a little bit further and actually try to reprogram the entire track! I’ve done this before, but this track was probably the most difficult one that I have done to date, crazy 303′s and FX sounds. The original track is Devil by Infected Mushroom. Now if you know this track at all then you will notice that this is not the entire thing, that’s because we where only give the first 5 minutes to analyze and the track gets really nasty after that point and I didn’t want to make things to difficult for myself. Anyway this is my cover version, which I did over two sessions in about 8 hours… enjoy….

I have some fantasitc goodies for you all today. Finally I have found a decent place (and way) of storing all my DJ sets, Mixcloud. What great thing this is, free to use, unlimited storage, zero restrictions it seems. One problem, it’s not possible to download any of the sets… B-( However I think that is almost irrelevent now given the connected nature of all our devices, and besides there are ways of working around things like that, I’m sure you are clever enough….. anyway my profile is HERE, and below is what you will see if you click the MIXES link at the top of the page.

After scowering the youtubes for hours, looking at old skool rave videos I finally found a clip of me playing a rave ! Watch the video below and flick forward to 3:00 minutes. I can’t quite remember the setup because things would change every gig, but on the left is an Amiga and I think I am playing with the sampler and mixer in the middle…. good old times. I should also add that the backing music isnot mine, and if you skip forward to the credits at the end you will see a cheesy photo of me…. that’s me on the left…. lol !

Well here it is, as promised, the last track off my first EP Release, Dance Around. I re-recorded this using an Amiga emulator and Octamed… wow that was a flashback! I was able to loop the audio through my Focusrite Audio card and record it directly into Wavelab, this meant that there was no noisy analogue loop in the recording like the other tracks. I mastered this in my new studio as well and I think the results speak for themselves, much, much clearer and punchier.  Take a listen…..